Amazon announces the public preview of AWS App Mesh, a service mesh for microservices on AWS

Yesterday, at AWS re:Invent, Amazon introduced AWS App Mesh, a service mesh for controlling and monitoring communication easily across the microservices on AWS. App Mesh standardizes the communication of microservices and gives users an end-to-end visibility. It can also be used with Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS to run containerized microservices.

Earlier it was difficult to pinpoint the exact location of errors when the number of microservices grew within an application. In order to solve this problem one had to build monitoring and control logic directly into the code and redeploy the microservices. AWS App Mesh solves the problem by making it easy to run microservices by providing visibility and network traffic controls for every microservice in an application. It also removes the need for updating application code.

With App Mesh, the logic for monitoring and controlling communications between the microservices is implemented as a proxy. This proxy runs alongside each microservice, instead of being built into the microservice code. App Mesh automatically sends the configuration information to each microservice proxy. The major advantage of placing a proxy in front of every microservice is that the metrics, logs, and traces between the services can automatically get captured.

Key Features of AWS App Mesh

Identifies issues with microservices

App Mesh captures metrics, logs, and traces from every microservice and exports this data to multiple AWS and third-party tools, including AWS X-Ray, Amazon CloudWatch, etc. for monitoring and controlling. This helps in identifying and isolating issues with any microservice in order to optimize the application.

Configures the traffic flow

With App Mesh one can easily implement custom traffic routing rules for ensuring that every microservice is highly available during deployments and after failures. AWS App Mesh is responsible for deploying and configuring a proxy that manages all communications traffic to and from the containers. It also removes the need for configuring the microservice’s communication protocols, writing custom code, or implementing libraries for operating applications.

Works with existing microservices

App Mesh can be used with existing or new microservices that are running on Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, Amazon EKS, and self-managed Kubernetes on AWS. App Mesh monitors and controls the communications for microservices that are running across orchestration systems, clusters.

Uses Envoy Proxy for monitoring

App Mesh also uses the open source Envoy proxy with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools for monitoring the microservices. Envoy is a self-contained process, designed to run alongside every application server.

To know more about this news, check out the Amazon’s official blog post.